The madhouse statuary seemed to dispel the pre-life we gave it.
in sleep, to become the one bauble rescued from that hoard, whose shapes
no one now will know. It cannot be said they existed. Yet
surely there was life, once in those seams, life the daughters of the iron teeth
of time gave it, and swallows flew over it. One might say, casually,
that there was variation in it, that there was texture. More, though,
one still couldn’t say. Yet one day the sanitation department decreed
it was coming through, a nice day in May with the usual blossoms, though these
were only accessories, having no bearing on the tale or
its context, petal-like, in fact, like a cat’s nose, but the judge
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
Subscribe for free: Stitcher | Apple Podcasts | Google Play